Rihanna More Popular Than Justin Bieber? Billboard Debuts Social Networking Chart

Did you recommend a Rihanna song on Twitter without buying her latest album, 'Loud'? Billboard now cares.

In an effort to better document how music is listened to and received, the music industry magazine bellwether recently introduced the Social 50, a new chart that tracks the most popular artists on all social networking websites.

While most Billboard charts rank artists based on retail sales provided by Nielsen SoundScan, the new chart will attempt to track the behavior and actions of average fans, looking at everything from artist page views on MySpace to song plays on YouTube.

"The Social 50 provides a weekly snapshot of the artists that music fans engage with the most in the social arena, which in today's world is a significant validation of their investment in an act," says Billboard Chart Director Silvio Pietroluongo.

From the official press release:

Serving as a complement to Billboard's existing weekly rankings, the Social 50 chart will tally artists' popularity using a formula blending weekly additions of friends/fans/followers along with weekly artist page views and weekly song plays on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and iLike. Data from these sites is gathered and provided to Billboard by social music tracking service Next Big Sound.

"The volume of online activity that top artists now receive is too big to ignore. We are thrilled that social music activity now receives the same emphasis as the music charts for which Billboard is synonymous," says Alex White, CEO of Next Big Sound.

Next Big Sound, the company hired by Billboard to track the popularity of each artist, launched in August 2009 as a comprehensive aggregator of online music data and traffic.

In contrast to many major labels, it's admirable to see an established industry giant acknowledge that the Internet exists, with the listening habits of consumers vastly different today than a decade ago.

Still, given how easily so many of these sites can be gamed, it will be interesting to see how accurate and respected this chart becomes. While SoundScan's accuracy has had its critics, its method of collecting sales info from approximately 14,000 retailers has become the industry standard for music sales. With marketing companies already offering dubious ways to increase your MySpace friends and YouTube views, the advent of this chart will probably lead to the vultures circling that much lower to the carcass.

I am with you about being sick of hearing about Justin. His popularity is because of the screaming tweens that no nothing about music and only think of him as being a good looking kid. There are pleanty of them out there.What is it with all the hype about him. Usher is the one who has the influence to put him out there.I would rather see someone that works hard for what they get. Not just having his fame dropped in his lap.He is not a good singer.Shame that looks makes a person popular rather than good hard work.